Professor T. A. Hunter, who, for a quarter of a century, has laboured enthusiastically in promoting the growth of liberal education throughout New Zealand, is one of our most distinguished educationists. In the following article, specially written for the New Zealand Railways Magazine, he discusses the Adult Education Movement and the fundamental principles which apply to education intended to develop true citizenship and social service.

Lindbergh has flown the Atlantic; Kingsford Smith has hopped the Pacific; the barriers that separate man from man from man are breaking down—have broken down. Time and Space are being eliminated; the millions of our own people, the tens of millions of the races of mankind are finding themselves cheek by jowl on a planet in which, until within the briefest span of the immediate past, the distances seemed so vast that one people appeared eternally separated from many others. The world is rapidly growing smaller; news that came to our pioneers in three or four months now flashes to their descendants in a few brief seconds. Steam and electricity, the aeroplane and the wireless, the factory, the cultivator and the newspaper have bound the world together; the age of invention has meant a new world, and man must perforce adjust himself to the new environment and the new ideas, or perish.